New consoles help design the PCs of the future, says Tim Sweeney, the CEO of Epic

I think by the time games actually use the power of the PS5 SSD, PC's will have something equivalent or better. Game developers need to support the older gen for the next few years, if they want to make money.

 

I believe consoles up until now were doing the opposite and holding back everything its about time storage started to be managed and leveraged better till now pc's just brute forced adding faster drives to speed things up but now they can use that brute force and optimize it.

 

I'm not so sure it's the consoles which hold us back, it's the money what consumers have. Part of the reason why we have consoles is that gaming PC's are expensive and if one 500€ plastic thing under TV will go do like 7-8years, it's great value. If there were no consoles, would people have 1000€ to upgrade PC every year to run new and more demanding games? Some would, but not everyone. So things would have to be made with slower PC's in mind for companies to actually sell their games.

And it's not all about the visuals, it's more about the gameplay (look at competitive gaming, SC2, DOTA2, LOL, CS:GO). Sure if you are going to release the same game every year and only add more pay to win stuff like look boxes then better to invest something on visuals so you can claim that it's better than the previous one and you definitely should spend 60-70€ for a copy of it.

 

Sweeney at it again

 

there is nothing in that video we havent seen in a well made demo of UE4 - the reason that demo looks so good is because the people who made it worked very diligently to add very small detail - in a real life scenario no developer will put that much effort for a full length game....

 

What is his point? That consoles are superior to pc's? Hah.

 

Rich people, Please stop doing drugs!

 

What has ps5 hardrive does that a nvme pciexpress 4.0 does not?
Is unclear to me. Isn't just a matter of bandwidth available on the bus?

 

There are multitudes of reasons what held us back more than 10 years.

1. Crysis 1 released in what, 2007? I believe it was the last game made in mind for future hardware. But that hardware never came. 6+ GHz single threaded CPUs never came. With single thread IPC increase diminishing every year, multi core CPUs came and developers had to make use of them.

2. Intel dominance. With AMD asleep, Intel released the same CPU for 10 generations. Sure there were SOME IPC gains but how much difference is there between 3770K and 6700K? With this dominance, Intel could increase price ever so slightly, that when AMD came we couldn't believe 8C/16T CPU can be "just 300EUR".

3. Nvidia dominance. Last good Radeon was 7970 which was better then what Nvidia had at that time. But then it was just same GPU release for years. And so, similarly Nvidia increased prices, so that 300 EUR is "entry-gaming" GPU. FFS, for 300 EUR you could buy 7950 in the days.

4. Developers, developers, developers! On the one hand, I salute them what kind of graphics they got out of PS3/360 and PS4/XboxOne. But that meant that for the most part they developed for the lowest common denominator and paid some other studio for porting to PC. And we got a lot of bad ports. Oh, I hated some games I wanted to play. Now almost all games use "console mechanics". For some games mouse is like an afterthought. Even for some FPSs!!!

5. Monitors and Resolution. I was an early adopter of a 4K monitor. Last year I bought a new one with HDR600 specs. Others went for Hz. 144, 244Hz. Up until the release of 2080 TI (super) there wasn't a GPU under 1000 dollars or EUR capable of running games at 4K 60FPS. Some games yes but mostly no.

Put everything together, you could say that for the last ten years, it was ... like the perfect storm. "A lost decade." There were strides made I don't deny that but if I look at how Crysis 1 looked AND how the game mechanics worked, there are a loooot of games that are still coming out that are (graphically and mechanics-wise) worse then Crysis 1.

 

Consoles absolutely have held gaming back. They're non-upgradable (except for storage) plastic things that sit under the TV for 7-8 years. It's hardware limitation, plain and simple. You don't need to upgrade PCs yearly (1000€, really?), that's nonsense. The initial cost is higher than a console but so is the performance and visual fidelity. As time goes by, you can simply make do with lower graphical settings and it would still look better than consoles. Also, console games cost a bit more and you need to pay for PS+/XLive to access multiplayer. Still cheaper than a proper gaming PC but also not as capable and versatile. It's not as clear cut as you make it out to be.

 

Just wanted to add to your point 3. You are not taking into consideration the mining craze factor which drived GPU prices to exhorbitant levels and was used to artificially make next gen GPU absurdly expensive, is not like AMD / Nvidia had a 300 high end GPU and the next gen decided to double the price out of nowhere.

* 4890 - 250 usd
* 5870 - 260-480
* 6970 - 370
* 7970 - 500
* r9 290x - 550
* Fury / Fury x - 550/650
Here is probably the end of the enthusiatic gpu race for AMD. And the start of the more prominent price increase.
* rx 480 - 240
* rx 580 /590 - 230/280
* Vega 56/64 - 400/500
*5700 / XT - 400/450

As you can see until 480/580 the "high end" segment is perfectly below 300 bucks I would even dare to compare the x80 version to all the previous xx80 models,3850($350), 4870($300), 5870($380), 6870($240), 7870($270).

Is in Nvidias side that GPU in the enthusiastic bracket are really expensive, I would not even call on AMD for that place since they have nothing really to go toe to toe with the big one like 2080 ti o super or w/e.

And here we are waiting for another rx 580/480 at 250 bucks but that aint gonna happen since we moved from xx80 series at 200-350 bucks to xx70 series at 400-450 bucks.all after the mining problem

 

I think some give too much importance to high-end GPUs. Even most enthusiasts at pages such as this won't get the top cards, they are simply too expensive.
The consoles will have to try to hit 4k resolutions (otherwise people will complain, and note, this alone means that a game will not look like that on the 5.0 engine on the consoles, it's too demanding for even the machines that are not out yet) but a lot of us PC players will stick with a lower resolution, I have no need for a 3080TI for 1440p/144hz.
Plus, like a slower SSDs will work fine, the game will simply read more of the data in advance to the RAM which is faster than any SSD.

 

After watching tech breakdowns of the PS5 ssd, reason Sweeny saying what he is about PC's needing to catch up on storage front. Sure nvme on PC have lots of bandwidth, but they aren't optimized as much as the ssd found in the PS5, devs can assign 6 levels of priority to any data on the ssd, if something is needed fast within half second to second, devs assign priority level 1 to the assets/data on the ssd, if they can wait for it then devs assign priority level 6 to it. 6 levels of priority vs PC storage which can assign 2 levels only. Devs also been told build levels/game worlds to take advantage of the PS5 storage device so no more black loading screens at all. Sony also using compression engine for i/o an custom chip, which is equivalent of another Zen 2 core basically, they can compress data on the fly to boost transfer speeds upto 8GB/s to 9GB/s range. Sony saying expansion bay on the PS5 needs minimum 7GB/s nvme pci-e 4.0 drive to pair to the system, which doesn't exists yet to match the drive found inside the PS5 due to overheads of trying force 6 levels of priority on a PC nvme spec drive.

 

But that plastic thing under the TV demands 60€ is subscription fees to play online every year as well, in this case amounting to around 450 bucks (almost its own value) that you're not going to get a return on. A TCO analysis is one of the fundamental reasons I always argue that owning a PC > owning a console, but the masses tend to focus on the cost of acquisition and neglect all the other functionalities of PCs.

 

I tend to disagree with most is written here about pc/consoles.
Gaming comes in many forms, and the competitive online game is its own kind of stuff.
As back in the days if you liked beat em ups you would prefer a saturn over a ps1 for nicer arcade ports, and a ps1 for more jrpg, or if you liked mario you tended to prefer the nintendo over the sega.

Now if you like competitive extreme gaming and free 2 play stuff pc is the best bet, it lasts longer than a console because those games are built to be not demanding.
If you like mmorpg you are better with an high resolution pc with a keyboard, enjoying the visual and chatting.
If you like other games you are probably better with a ps4/ps5/xbox.
Nothing is holding back anything, good playability and interesting story are far better than cool graphic and we need that. I prefer to play 30 good games with the ps4 graphic, and those will not look bad to me just because some cool tech demo/benchmark look awesome on powerful hardware.

Oh and do we want to start on the nintendo switch? that is a console too with tablet class hardware and looks GREAT to me.

The 60 euro needed per year to get online with sony are easily paid back from the 24 free games you get from it.

My computer with a 1080ti will soon be obsolete and i will have to buy a new videocard that will be at least 800 eur to surpass the 1080ti by a factor of 2x.

 

I highly disagree that a console is "great value". You pay less for a comparatively powerful 'gaming PC', sure, but only for a couple months. Also the idea that you have to pay $1000 for an equivalent PC is silly. When the PS4 came out, a comparatively powerful PC was about as expensive. Not to mention the fact that games on PC are almost always cheaper. Even big Triple-A titles go on sale for PC at a staggering regularity, which begs the question of what value proposition were you referring to?

Up front, the initial cost of the console is cheaper sure, but every console to date that has had an online option has had the person pay either monthly or yearly to be able to connect to that service, on top of the ISP bill that comes every month. Games for consoles are almost always the full $60 tag. Even after two years, most games are still at full price with little in the way of discounts being had. Indie games only just started to pop up from the past few years, so lower priced games were a rarity on the market. After that, there's peripherals, which are always laughably more expensive than they should be.

Where's the value there? The console here costs them $500 to make, that's already been leaked by multiple sources. That means it'll cost the consumer upwards of what the PS3 did way back when, around the $700 mark. So no, there's no way in hell that value will be on the side of the consumer unless they've already got a massive library of games from previous console lines. Also, it's worth mentioning that most consoles don't actually play those older games any better than the previous generation did. They're trying to market 4k 60fps to a crowd that only sits at a maximum of 1080p-30... and let's not get into the point that you have to own a 4K TV firsthand, with even the cheapest options still costing upwards of $450.

It's time to face the facts. Consoles typically always play catch-up against PCs. The last time a console actually annihilated PCs at the time, and kept it up for a few years, was the Xbox 360, and even THEN the devs of Fallout New Vegas openly said that they were held back by the hardware of the 360 at the time!

So unless this fabled PS5 has some truly legendary hardware setup under the hood that will make the world's collective jaw drop, I don't see this machine as being anything more than another console launch. The best thing that ever happened to consoles was the shift to an x86 CPU. That was the last groundbreaking achievement in my opinion.

 

What are you guy's speaking.
PC + piratery that is why PC games and gaming on PC did not pull ahead.
The rest comes after.

 

Maybe if developers were coding for PC's from the get to we'd be seeing the future of PC's right now!?!

"Consoles" dictate the future of PC's!?!?! You mean sales and of an IP dictate what happens inain development cycle....!

Remember that consoles are already three years old hardware wise right out of the gate. Parity I think not.

These people. Hence why we've been stuck on eight cores or less with the newest games in the last six years...

 

Salesman he is....